Mogao Cave 17 is sealed

Assembled from 34 blocks · 2 evidence · 34 related

1. Story
2. The Library Cave is walled up and plastered over in the early eleventh century, for reasons still debated: a response to threat, or the orderly retirement of sacred but disused material. Whatever the reason, it preserved around fifty thousand items in a dozen languages for nine hundred years.
3. Knowledge
4. Dunhuang
5. Mogao Caves
6. Mogao Cave 17 is sealed
7. Connections
8. Mogao Caves
9. Dunhuang
10. Religious syncretism at contact points
11. Dunhuang
12. Dunhuang
13. Buddhism
14. First cave cut at Mogao (traditional date)
15. The Dunhuang Diamond Sutra is printed
16. Mogao Cave 17 is sealed
17. Wang Yuanlu opens Mogao Cave 17
18. The Dunhuang manuscripts are dispersed
19. Mogao Caves inscribed on the World Heritage List
20. Traditional founding of the first cave at Mogao
21. Northern Tarim route
22. Southern Tarim route
23. Mogao Caves
24. Mogao Caves
25. First cave cut at Mogao (traditional date)
26. The Sogdian Ancient Letters are abandoned west of Dunhuang
27. Mogao Cave 17 is sealed
28. Wang Yuanlu opens Mogao Cave 17
29. Silk Road religious corridor
30. Buddhism attested in Han China
31. Traditional founding of the first cave at Mogao
32. Evidence
33. Catalogues and digitally reunites the material removed from Mogao Cave 17 and other eastern Silk Road sites between 1900 and the 1920s, now held in London, Paris, Beijing, St Petersburg and Tokyo. The dispersal is physical and permanent; the reassembly is digital.
34. 492 decorated cave temples with roughly 45,000 square metres of murals and over 2,000 painted sculptures, cut between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, together with the manuscript hoard of Cave 17.